Why the Surge is Not a Success

Violence is down and the Republicans are aching to declare victory. But the result of our strategy in Iraq over the past years is still a disaster when the condition of Iraqi refugees is considered. Today’s Washington Post discusses the plight of returning Iraqis:

When the Iraqi government last month invited home the 1.4 million refugees who had fled this war-ravaged country for Syria -- and said it would send buses to pick them up -- the United Nations and the U.S. military reacted with horror.

U.N. refugee officials immediately advised against the move, saying any new arrivals risked homelessness, unemployment and deprivation in a place still struggling to take care of the people already here. For the military, the prospect of refugees returning to reclaim houses long since occupied by others, particularly in Baghdad, threatened to destroy fragile security improvements.

"It's a problem that everybody can grasp," said a senior U.S. diplomat here. "You move back to the house that you left and find that somebody else has moved into the house, maybe because they've been displaced from someplace else. And it's even more difficult than that, because in many cases the local militias . . . have seized control and threw out anybody in that neighborhood they didn't like."

The vast population upheaval resulting from Iraq's sectarian conflict has left the country with yet another looming crisis. At least one of every six Iraqis -- about 4.5 million people -- has left home, some for other parts of Iraq, others for neighboring nations.

The thorny issues were evident when the first and so far only group of families was bused back from Syria by the Iraqi government on Nov. 28. According to the United Nations, only about a third of the 30 families returned to their original homes. Most of the rest, finding a new sectarian makeup in their neighborhood or their property pillaged, moved in with already overburdened relatives in other parts of the Baghdad area.
For many Iraqis, the homes they left no longer exist. Houses have been looted, destroyed or occupied. Most Baghdad neighborhoods, where Shiites and Sunnis once lived side by side, have been transformed into religiously homogeneous bastions where members of the other sect dare not tread.

U.S. military commanders and diplomats here acknowledge that the recent decline in violence is the result, in part, of the city's segregation. There are now far fewer mixed neighborhoods where religious militias can target members of the other sect.

In most of Baghdad, the population shift has been at the expense of Sunnis, many of whose former neighborhoods are newly populated by poorer Shiite migrants under militia protection and, often, control. Groups such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia "are no longer just thugs who are carrying guns around on the street," the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity about the issue. "They've kind of supplanted local government, with streams of revenue -- rent from housing they've taken over, protection money from businesses," and control of fuel and electricity supplies.

The number of Iraqis returning under their own steam is still a relative trickle. The Iraqi Red Crescent estimates that 25,000 have come back from Syria since September, while the Iraqi government puts the combined total in recent months at 60,000 from Syria and Jordan, where the Iraqi refugee population totals about 700,000.
Recent surveys conducted by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees paint an increasingly dire picture of refugee life. In Syria, a third of Iraqi refugees said their resources will last for less than three more months. With new Syrian visa requirements and restrictions on services, nearly half said their children have dropped out of school.

Bush’s Budget

Even his Republican allies in Congress are having trouble appreciating the new found ‘fiscal discipline’ that George Bush is claiming as he vetoes bill after bill. Today’s Washington Post has some telling comments.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the conservative ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee:

I see the president trying to play catch-up in two years for not vetoing anything in the first six years, and probably regretting that he treated the Republican Congress with softer gloves than he did a Democrat Congress. He's kind of waking up to the necessity of having a certain policy that ought to be consistently followed, even if it's irrational.

G. William Hoagland, a Republican budget adviser to former Senate majority leader Bill Frist (Tenn.):

I have difficulty seeing how $11 billion or $22 billion in discretionary spending on the domestic side of the equation is so fiscally irresponsible when juxtaposed against these major AMT provisions of $50 billion, or certainly against the $70-plus billion they want for the global war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan It doesn't pass the sensible man's test.

Brian Riedl, a conservative budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation:

In his first six years in office, Bush accepted domestic discretionary spending increases from Republican-controlled Congresses that averaged 7 percent a year. In his showdown with the current Democratic Congress, the president is insisting on spending growth of 4 percent at most.

The Bush threat to veto the change to the AMT, if successful, will mean that middle class taxes will rise, although you would never know that from Republican propaganda. His opposition to this change comes from his unwillingness to pay for the AMT by raising taxes on hedge fund managers who get a tax break that is patently unfair.

He also opposes the elimination of incentives to large oil companies. In 2006, Bush opposed more tax incentives. "I will tell you, with $55 oil, we don't need incentives to oil and gas companies to explore," he told a gathering of newspaper editors. "There are plenty of incentives." Grassley said Bush personally reiterated that position to him in 2006, during a private White House session on taxes.

The Bush Presidency will be deemed a success according to their goals of reducing taxes for the richest people in the US, appointing hard right conservatives to the Supreme Court, and getting re-elected. The disaster that resulted to the country in costs of weakened status in the world, squandered resources in Iraq, and massive debt for subsequent years be damned.

Nothing Has Changed

President Bush’s response to the issuance of the new NIE report on Iran’s program to develop nuclear weapons is “nothing has changed.” Although the report does a complete u-turn from the 2005 estimate and now states that Iran has not had a covert nuclear development program since 2003, Bush continues to charge that Iran is the greatest danger to the world.

He was told that a revised estimate was being written last August yet persisted in drawing a World War III analogy about Iran in October.

His administration stubbornly refuses to broach serious discussions with the Iran regime.
The same pressure on the intelligence agencies that lead to the erroneous conclusions about Iraq are at play here. It is easy to imagine the Bush/Cheney insistence to find Iran culpable leading to intelligence reports that gave the administration what it wanted to hear. It is easy to believe that the administration only heard what its ideology wanted it to hear.

What has changed is a new intelligence director more concerned with getting it right then staying in the good graces of the administration, along with an unpopular lame-duck presidency and an opposition Congress.

The Bush policy since 9/11 has been driven by tactics intended to scare the American people and the rest of the world, regardless of whether facts supported their position or not. We have just a little more than a year to go before they are out and hopefully, this latest news, while not stemming the rhetoric, will limit their action options.